In the Safdie brothers’ newest movie Uncut Gems, Adam Sandler plays a wheeler-dealer whose world is always on the brink of greatness or collapse.
Uncut Gems is playing now in limited release and should expand wider later in the month. My review is at PopMatters:
He has a good line of gab, Howard, but what he does best is what every true operator understands: Just keep talking, never stop moving, and keep those plates spinning. Uncut Gems is an exhausting movie about an exhausting character, shot through with an intoxicating restless relentlessness powered in large part by Sandler’s ferociously hungry performance…
Kristen Wiig and Annete Bening in ‘Girl Most Likely’.
Every so often a former SNL performer finds their way to a career outside sketch comedy. Chris Rock, Adam Sandler, and so on. But there’s an even longer list of those who found that their talents just didn’t translate well into different mediums. One new addition to that list just might be Kristen Wiig, whose new comedy Girl Most Likely is out in theaters now. To her credit, she’s far from the worst thing about the the movie.
As the star of the flimsy, dreary debacle that is Girl Most Likely, Kristen Wiig joins the august pantheon of modern actresses forced to debase and humiliate themselves for ninety minutes or so of pop-song-scored OMG embarrassments. Her Imogene is another in a long line of female screen neurotics who are brought low by an inability to get out of their own head before being rescued by a patient, doe-eyed, and dark-haired dreamboat with a Crest Whitening smile. Michelle Morgan’s manic script — which cruises along on derivative and mean-spirited cliche before detouring into are-they-joking inanity in the last section — barely situates Imogene before it starts to destroy her; this may be an irrelevant problem, though, since she’s such an unpleasant piece of work that more time in her company wouldn’t have created more sympathy…
Summer reading: Did you forget your Michael Crichton?
What is it about summer that turns everyone’s expectations of art to slush? Think of it: “summer movie” implies something gargantuan in scope and pea-sized in intellect. Adam Sandler saves Earth from aliens by making stupid faces, say. The end of the school year comes with breathless anticipation of the first summer movie ruining the sub-woofers at your multiplex.
It’s the same thing with books. The lists of great summer or “beach” reads is an annual tradition for most of those publications that still bother covering books at all. It’s the usual fluff. A mystery about a woman who goes missing. A woman finds love in Tuscany. Another serial killer from James Patterson.
Speaking of summer reading, the Times asked a number of known novelists to opine on their planned books for the beach. Colum McCann (Let the Great World Spin) wins hands-down for honesty:
Whenever summer rolls around I begin to realize that I’m a complete and utter book snob. In relation to reading, I have absolutely no guilty pleasures at all. No graphic novels. No murder mysteries. No “milky-white thigh” stories. No fifty shades of anything.
While you might take issue with him throwing all graphic novels in with “guilty pleasures,” how many of us would admit to the same thing? The society as a whole is so anti-literate these days that those readers who just don’t see the point in reading junk are seen as being somehow out of touch. McCann again:
So, my guilty pleasures are my original pleasures. I read “Ulysses,” or at least a part of it, every summer for Bloomsday. It’s hardly a beach read, and I understand that Molly Bloom might not be very content with me, as a reader, carting sand into her bed, but that’s life. The great thing is that she has no say about it. Sorry, Molly, but you are in with the suntan lotion.
This summer I’m reading “Lolita” again. The book seems constantly split open with sunlight. I find it one of the funniest and most poignant books I have ever read. I suppose there’s a certain amount of guilty pleasure in the novel, especially if, like me, you’re even older than Humbert Humbert. Unveiling the book at your neighbor’s barbecue might raise a few eyebrows, but again that’s life, or rather literature.
(As an aside, not enough people realize that Lolita is a comedy. Tragic, to be sure, but a comedy nonetheless.)
There’s no reason to avoid trash entirely; every now and again you need a book that you can zip right through in two or three hours and toss aside; like a movie. But the implication that you must read something inane just because you’re at the beach or the weather is hot, feels like a strange and onerous cultural imposition.
Chris Barsanti 
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